My first big break came when I was five years old. It's taken me more than 70
years to realise that. You see, at five I first learnt to read. It's that
simple and it's that profound. I left school at 13. I didn't have a formal
education. And yet there I was, accepting the 34th American Film Institute's
Life Achievement Award in the summer of 2006. I told the Hollywood audience
that without the lust for reading instilled in me all those years ago by my
teachers at the Bruntsfield Primary School in Edinburgh, I would not have
been there with them that night. It had been a long journey to that
glittering event from my two-room Fountainbridge home in the smoky
industrial end of Edinburgh near the McCowans' toffee factory.
When I took a taxi during a recent Edinburgh Film Festival, the cabbie was
amazed that I could put a name to every street we passed. “How come?” he
asked. “As a boy I used to deliver milk round here,” I said. “So what do you
do now?” he asked. That was rather harder to answer...
I was born on August 25th, 1930. We lived at the top of a tenement at 176
Fountainbridge. There was no hot water and no bathroom. The communal
lavatory was outside, four floors down. For years we had only gas lighting.
Sometimes the light in the shared stairway would be out after some desperado
had broken the mantle, to bubble gas through milk for kicks. We were the
smallest family in the building: we knew most of the others, especially the
elderly. “Better go and see if Mrs Corrigan needs to run a message,” my mum
would ask me. Then you didn't walk, you ran for her groceries - bread,
firewood or brickettes.
We moved three times within the one building and each time was an advancement.
We ended up on the second floor with a view onto the street. I remember my
excitement seeing the length of Fountainbridge from the window. Diagonally
across the street from our home was a pub at the entrance of McEwan's
brewery. As a boy it always puzzled me why the workers piled into that pub
at the end of the day to pay for the beer they were being paid to brew,
since drinking free ‘pauchy' or unfiltered beer was always allowed at work.
When I was young, I didn't know that I lacked anything, because I had nothing
to compare it with. There's a freedom in that. I had a very hard-working
mother and father and I still think about them both a great deal. In the
Scottish tradition I was called Thomas after my father's father, which was
shortened to Tam by my friends. I had great affection for the old rascal,
who was always getting into scrapes. He fought boxing bouts in public parks,
encouraged by my grannie Jennie, who often kept his corner ...Fifty years
later I modelled much of Jesse McMullen, that street-wise career criminal in
Family Business, on my tough old wily granddad. As a boy I learnt what was
happening in the neighbourhood by watching how a policeman approached the
police hut across the street from our home. How he walked told you
everything. You knew that nothing was afoot if he'd stroll along his beat
and then slowly unlock the metal door. But when he rushed down the street,
tore off his helmet and dived through the door, you knew something serious
was up. When I came to play the Chicago cop Jimmy Malone in The
Untouchables, I drew on my memories of those Fountainbridge policemen.
My mother lost two brothers in the war and although we couldn't afford it she
adopted Donald, the love child of a doctor and a maid she knew...As I
approached my 13th birthday in August 1943 I couldn't see the point of
returning to school. I wasn't learning much. I wanted to work, earn money
and play soccer. Since it was wartime, somehow I got away with it. Most of
the working men were in the Forces, so I soon got a job at St Cuthbert's,
the local dairy of the Co-operative Wholesale Society. Like most families in
Foutainbridge, we were members of the Co-op. Every time you bought anything,
you gave in your number. I have never forgotten mine: 26245 Connery.
I remember my first day so well. To be like the big boys I ran out to buy
moleskin trousers. The horse I groomed was a Highland garron pony called
Tich and I loved her dearly. I bought her rosettes and chains, which looped
down from each ear, along with a martingale or bracelet, which hung down her
front. I added birlers, roundels which birled or twirled in the wind, or
when she trotted. I was so proud of Tich that I entered her in the annual
horse and cart competition for the best-dressed horse and she won a Highly
Commended.
Connery joined the Navy, but was invalided out with duodenal ulcers.
Looking back, it was probably my inability to take orders from the officers,
especially from those I found had reached their position largely through
privilege. Over 20 years later my experiences below deck put fire into my
performance of Joe Roberts, the picked upon courtmarshalled sergeant major
in The Hill, Sydney Lumet's astute exposure of merciless punishment in the
British Army.
Back in Edinburgh I had taken up body-building at the Dunedin Amateur Weight
Lifting Club. Its name made the club sound grand and it sported its own
blazer, yet it operated out of a disused air raid shelter with bare electric
bulbs and the minimum of facilities.
There I met Archie Brennan, a talented weaver at the Dovecote Tapestry Company
and the Edinburgh College of Art, who told me about posing as a model for
easy money. It wasn't easy remaining motionless for 50 minutes. The
professional model was Mancini, who could hold his pose for the exact
period, before taking his ten-minute break.
Years later Richard Demarco reminded me that I had posed for his group of
students and I fear he has the paintings to prove it. There wasn't that much
money in it, but it was an entry into another world... [Later] I was asked,
along with two other tall life-guards, to dress up for walk-on parts in Anna
Neagle's Glorious Days at the Empire Theatre. All we had to do was to don a
guard's uniform, which really was easy money.
Other times I did real guard duties outside dance halls. During a Musicians
Union strike I became a bouncer for fund raising jazz bands at Oddfellows in
the Old Town. When I barred a rowdy bunch from entering one of them menaced
me. “It's just because we're foking Irishmen.” “No,” I said, “it's just
because you're foking drunk.”
Along with a number of Edinburgh friends I entered the Mr Universe contest in
London. Despite what many claim, I never won any awards. There were far too
many massive real muscle men to take care of the medals. I appeared
ridiculous standing next to the eventual winner, an American called Bill
Pearl, with a physique like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Beside him I looked like
one of those 7 stone weaklings in a Charles Atlas ad.
It was during this competition when I first heard that Joshua Logan was
casting for the British run of the American musical South Pacific ...All you
had to do was to look like an American and do a couple of handsprings. I got
[a] part cutting up wood on stage before springing up and singing There is
Nothing like a Dame. Since they were guaranteeing £12 per week, which was as
much as I had ever earned, I signed up for the two-year national tour. I had
no ambition then to be an actor, it was purely the money and the fun that
got me hooked.
Matt Busby calls, but I get the acting bug
While acting in South Pacific Connery faced the choice of a career in football
rather than film: “During the tour we formed a South Pacific soccer XI and
played all comers; any amateur, police team or anyone else who would take us
on. When we had a match against a Manchester United junior team, their
legendary manager Matt Busby was among the spectators. Busby came to the
show and presented us all with soccer strips. Best of all, I was spotted by
one of the scouts and offered a trial.
The thought of being a Busby Babe and playing for Manchester United was then
every young soccerer's ambition. My affection for the theatre took a sudden
swerve to a soccer field's left wing. Could I still be that soccerer of my
dreams? When I got back to my digs I ran my exciting offer of a soccer trial
past my new friend, Robert Henderson, one of the leading American actors in
the show. ‘But you told me how much you were enjoying being an actor,' he
said, stalling my enthusiasm in its tracks.
The advice which this remarkable man then gave me would change my life.
‘You've shown that you have talent in two different worlds,' he said. ‘If you
choose soccer you may have another ten years, but as an actor you could go
on till you drop. But if you choose acting you still have two problems. The
first concerns your near impenetrable Scots burr.' I realised that I had a
problem here since another cast member, Millicent Martin, later famous in
That Was The Week That Was, had thought that I was Polish. ‘Secondly,'
Robert went on, ‘you have to educate yourself. If you're really serious
about acting, I will help you.' Up until this moment I had never
contemplated acting as a career. I just thought it was a great way of
earning more money. My week's pay had recently been upped to £14 a week,
which seemed a fortune. For the first time I had been given a definitive
direction to do something in life and have half a chance to be somebody.”
Spectacular shots in the saddle were often just accidents
Tich, my faithful companion on those early morning milk rounds, together with
the Wild West antics of Tony, Tom Mix's wonder steed on the silver screen,
may have kindled my special relationship with horses. Or was it riding that
massive carthorse over the fields next to my grandfather's home in Fife
during school holidays that really bonded me with horses, which lingers to
this day?
I still feel comfortable in the saddle and have never had any fear of horses.
Within reason I am always up for tackling the film stunts dreamt up by
screen writers in the safety of their own garrets. Yet in the films I've
made involving horsemanship, from Zardoz to The Untouchables, some of my
more spectacular action sequences resulted from accidents. When riding full
tilt in Highlander, Russell Mulcahy, the director, signalled a turn but when
I reined my charger round, my sword got entangled in my cape and dug sharply
into the horse's flank. The panicked beast veered suddenly sideways at the
gallop, menacingly close to a dangerous drop. “More of that,” was all the
delighted director shouted back.
Any horse that I'm asked to ride in movies, I like to take out for an early
morning canter so that the two of us get to know each other before any of
the action begins. In The Wind and the Lion I rode quite a small horse,
which was quick and much more flexible for filming dialogue than a bigger
horse would ever have been. The script called for a rider to charge through
a first floor window into a courtyard below. I was playing the impressively
sounding Mulay Achmed Mohammed el-Raisuli the Magnificent, so clearly this
was a stunt too far for me. We were in good hands, filming around Seville
where, without question, live the world's best horsemen. In order to
persuade the horse to defenestrate against its better reason, it was first
taught to approach an opening obscured by tissue paper and then gradually
introduced to slashed transparent plastic sheeting. After a number of false
starts the horse gave up shying and wouldn't hesitate to charge straight
through. On the actual day of shooting it was led upstairs into a
first-storey living room facing the specially constructed French windows. A
sand bank had been piled up in the courtyard below, calculated to be long
enough to break the horse's fall with its rider on top. With four poised
cameras ready to go, the horse sensed the excitement and in a terrified
flash took off like a bullet, charging straight through the windows into the
air - so far that it totally missed the sand, throwing the rider on to his
head. Everyone thought that the American stunt rider was dead. They rushed
him by helicopter to a Málaga hospital, but having been given two aspirins
in flight he arrived miraculously totally recovered. It took over four hours
to find the startled horse, which had bolted miles away. Only two cameramen
were quick enough to catch its unrepeatable action.
In Shalako I had my own excitement. At short notice I was given Brigitte
Bardot's stand-by white horse. This would save time unbuckling the special
harness of her number one horse since she was riding side-saddle. With the
light beginning to fail there was no time for my usual practice run. As I
rode through the Almeira orchards the horse reared. Fortunately I was lucky
enough to get one leg out of the stirrup, for if a horse comes back flat and
its whole weight falls on you, it's ‘Goodnight sweet prince'.
Copyright Sean Connery 2008
Extracted from Being a Scot, by Sean Connery and Murray Grigor, to be
published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, August 21, at £20.00
